Guilford County had and still has a large Quaker population. Quaker records can provide information that may be difficult or impossible to find in existing non-Quaker vital records. Vital records for all Quaker meetings (which included worship or preparatory meetings) were recorded at the governing monthly meeting (MM). That does not mean that the family lived in the same county where the MM was located. A family may have attended meetings at the MM location, or they may have attended a preparatory meeting elsewhere, closer to their home. Their home and/or the local meeting may be in an adjoining county. Study the census and tax and deed records. Be aware that it would be exceptional for a birth or death to occur at the MM location itself, although a marriage may occur there.

The source of the event and its date is not the same thing as the location of the event itself.

All you can safely say is that the event occurred “under the care of New Garden Monthly Meeting.”

Not every family using these surnames was Quaker, or remained Quaker throughout their time in Guilford. While many of these families would have been Quaker before they arrived in the area, some became Quaker after arrival. Some of these family names appear only once or a few times, and some have entries that take up several columns. Sometimes there are gaps of years or even decades between entries. I have given you the date range from the first to the last entries in the meeting minutes, but that date range may not indicate how long the family belonged to the meeting. For example, the last entry may be that the family was received into membership from another location; they could have belonged to that meeting for years and even decades after that date. Be aware that some entries were “retrospective,” and were due to the clerk recording prior events in other locations when a family joined the meeting. You will see this in particular in the New Garden minutes. Those are noted as to place of the event, and are wonderful details to find on these families.

One of the great advantages to the minutes is that families moved from meeting to meeting by using certificates to transfer their membership, and that enables you to track family movements from one location to another. There were many Quaker migrations from the Carolinas to the Midwest in the early decades of the 1800’s, and MM minutes provide valuable information on those migrations.

I did not consult the BMD (birth, marriage, death) records for each family in each meeting, which are grouped separately in the MM records and their abstracts, as that would have added a great deal of work to this project. Be aware that those records do exist, and that they can also reflect prior events in other locations. Some deaths were recorded in the minutes themselves. If you find a surname of interest listed on this page, and the time period includes the one of interest to you, then you should consult a copy of the Hinshaw abstracts. My main goal for preparing this page was to help people discover that they may have Quaker roots, and realize that they need to look at Quaker records to see if that is indeed the case.

I have excluded married surnames of brides who were dismissed from membership for “marriage out of unity,” unless the bride was received into membership later. Those entries were usually the only ones for those surnames, and those brides are indexed under their maiden surnames. In most of those situations, the groom’s family was not a Quaker family. As the 1800’s progressed, those couples were not always dismissed. Some couples “condemned” their marriage out of unity, and continued as members, particularly if they were both Quakers. I have included married surnames when the bride was reported as being married, but not dismissed or removed at that time, and also married surnames when the bride condemned her marriage as a way of making amends with the meeting. A marriage out of unity can give you valuable information on a bride’s marriage and maiden name, so, when in doubt, check the Hinshaw abstracts.

While these meetings were established at earlier dates, sometimes records were lost due to fires, etc.

The dates given below are the dates of the records which were available to the workers who prepared the abstracts.

There are other meetings in the area now, but these are the ones which were established in Guilford prior to 1900.